by John Foster
The shortcomings of the old model were evident enough. Fidel recited them with ready facility, which was a tribute to his orderly Jesuit education: egoism, greed, sensuality, sloth, prostitution of all sorts, usury. These, according to El Che, were the ways of wolves. The New Man, stripped of petit-bourgeois morality and ideology, would govern his conduct by ‘the most noble principles of collectivism, self-sacrifice, love of work, hatred of exploitation and parasitism, and a fraternal spirit of co-operation and solidarity’.
Inspired by this splendid vision, the Revolution went to work with a will. At first the Chief of Public Order made the battle against petit-bourgeois decadence his personal responsibility. With his men he would surround the posadas of Havana with lights and loud-hailers and announce: ‘You have five minutes from now to abandon your vicious antics!’ Such were the demands of this crusade that the Chief himself became exhausted and retired to a less strenuous existence in the United States. The campaign, however, went on. The stream of sexual tourists dried up. Parasitism declined. The gay bars of Havana—the San Michel, the Dirty Dick and sundry other stains on the national honour—were swept away. And yet tell-tale signs of the old order persisted. In particular, it appeared that sterner measures were needed to eliminate the sickness, la enfermedad, of unnatural desire. This infirmity was discovered in the most exalted places: in the ministries of state, in the University, in the Union of Artists and Writers. Detected cases were systematically removed, and a watchful eye was kept on the dangerous professions that were so unaccountably prone to infection. In due course the watchful eye extended its gaze to the school of the National Ballet, and there it lighted on the suspect figure of the dancing Juan.
The most noble principle of collectivism dictated that he should be removed, and the health of the Ballet was thus protected. But as he was only fourteen, his own cure was deferred until the malady had fully ripened. The Revolution could be patient, and so he had time to contemplate his future treatment. What form it might take he learned from La Negra, who had been an early beneficiary of the programme.
Her treatment had begun quite unexpectedly, at the time of the annual military call-up. On the appointed day she had reported, as required, in the town square, along with the other conscripts of her year. A sergeant sorted them according to their various intended destinations. La Negra had indicated to the authorities a preference for the airforce, which seemed more stylish than the army. But strangely, she found herself allotted to a company of curiously unmilitary types: sons of the swinish rich, a priest, a pimp and a poofter. Soldiers with bayonets prodded them into the back of a truck. ‘Hardly the way to treat your new recruits,’ she thought. And then, as they left the city and rolled north across the country to the province of Camaguey, the treatment began.
When they arrived at their camp, the staff assembled to greet them. They were ordered to undress. They were issued with grey shirts, green fatigues and working boots—’the lowest class in the lowest echelon of shoes’. They were taken to a football field, given a total haircut and set to work cutting cane. They had been recruited, they now realised, to a Military Unit to Aid Production. In other countries and at other times the UMAPs, as they were called, were more simply known as concentration camps. And so it was appropriate that there was a large sign above the entrance gate which said: WORK WILL MAKE A MAN OF YOU!
Of course, a man is not made by work alone. For that, education is also necessary, which is why the camp provided classes for instruction in the principles of the Revolution. At first these classes were co-educational, so to speak, but then it appeared that the locas had a curious knack of subverting the learning process, so they were given separate attention and helped to learn with beatings. A couple went crazy; a couple killed themselves; a few escaped.
La Negra’s treatment lasted for two years until one day, when she could no longer stand on her swollen feet, and with infected lungs, unexpectedly they sent her home. The treatment had failed, but at least it had confirmed the initial diagnosis. She was indeed an invalid.
By the time La Negra returned to Guantánamo, the Revolution was nearly ten years old. The Year of the Heroic Guerrilla had drawn to a close and the Year of the Decisive Effort had dawned. Fidel was rallying the nation again, this time in aid of the sadly underdeveloped economy. The Revolution needed cash, and to secure it, the energy of the whole people must be harnessed to achieve a sugar harvest of unprecedented magnitude: ten million tons! They should work, urged Fidel (who was growing increasingly fond of military metaphors) like soldiers in the face of an enemy attack. Nothing should interfere with their will to battle. Even Christmas, and the Feast of the Three Kings, was postponed for six months until the harvest could be safely gathered in.
The scholarship students, too, were required to participate in the intended triumph of the record harvest. One of them, a girl from Guantánamo, was interviewed by a team of American anthropologists who happened to be in Cuba at the time.
Of course [she told them] things are going to be just a little bit scarcer now, because all the workers are spending so much time in the sugar cane harvest so we can finally stop being an underdeveloped country and strike yet another blow against imperialism. We’re determined that Cuba shall remain sovereign and free, that never again shall a traitor trample it underfoot. My fatherland comes first with me. I’d rather die than see it under the imperialist yoke.
Fatherland or death! Patria o muerte! How correct she was, this girl. She thought a lot about the future. ‘Nothing is impossible now,’ she told the anthropologists. ‘Whatever I propose to do, I can.’ Writing was her vocation: ‘writing perhaps about the Revolution, so that future generations will know how we lived. That’s my dream and I know that some day I’ll wake up and find it come true.’
When Juan Gualberto contemplated his future in that decisive year, it must have appeared less enticing: ten million tons of sugar; and then back to the dreary routine of the Veterinary Institute of Havana where they were making him learn Russian. After that, when he would finally come of military age, a concentration camp.
In making this sombre assessment of his prospects, his view was undoubtedly coloured by that bourgeois individualism that the Party so strongly deplored. As the watchful eye at the Ballet School had foreseen, the fault in him that had first shown up as a mere lack of manliness was beginning to bear its ideological fruit. He was developing counter-revolutionary tendencies. He murmured against the sacrificial shortages, against the monotonous ration of rice soup and the nauseous macaroni. He hated his one pair of white cotton trousers which, at the end of a day in the harvest, were stiff as a board from the dried juice of the sugar cane. He despised the red-faced Russians he had observed in the streets of Havana and hated their grating language. No wonder, then, that back home for the Year of Decisive Effort, he was more charmed than ever by the forbidden music from the radio station at the navy base. No wonder that he idolised the Supremes, that he memorised the lyrics of Dionne Warwick; that he dreamed, still, of dancing; that he was excited by the talk he heard in the little queenly circle that met, though now more furtively, at the edge of the cemetery.
As the very correct girl had told the anthropologists, nothing is impossible. If the Revolution would not accommodate your dreams, so much the worse for the Revolution. Cuba might be a prison, but it was not escape-proof. Everybody knew that. There had been many fugitives, and many deaths as the refugees launched themselves in leaking boats and rafts on the current that would float them, they prayed, to Florida. But in Guantánamo there was a more tempting possibility—the short but hazardous route across the border to the US naval base.
When she had recovered sufficiently from her treatment, La Negra was among the first to take this route; and when it was clear that she had made good her escape, others prepared to follow. Then it was time for Juan.
Did he leave defiantly? With mock bravado? Or sick with fear, not least the fear of losing face if he pulled back at the last moment? I know on
ly that he left silently, without farewells, in the company of an older friend called Alex.
At night they made their way to the coast near the border, slipping past the watchtower when the guards changed duty. By day they hid in a mangrove swamp. Then in the darkness of the second night they made their way through the salt flats that stretched into the sea and struck out, half stumbling and half swimming, across the water to the base. A boat picked them up in its searchlight. There was shouting, but in the humid June night the voices did not carry. They could see no insignia. The boat drew alongside and fished them out of the sea. And thank God, said Juan when he recited this story as a party trick, it was the Americans!
At the naval base they were accorded the status of political refugees and then despatched to Miami to join a bunch of other escapees in the care of a Catholic refugee agency. When they had been properly processed, they were asked about their intended destination. Some chose to stay in Florida, others nominated Los Angeles or Chicago. Then they came to Juan. ‘Take me to Paris!’ he said. They did the best they could, and put him on the train to New York City.
He was free, and fifteen, and he had stored up for himself an agony of future remorse. How could he have known, as he travelled north, that he had broken the heart of Clara de la Rosa? Or that his mother would give birth ten months later to a second brother whom he would never see.
CHAPTER TWO
Life is no dream! Beware and beware and beware! We tumble downstairs to eat the damp of the earth Or we climb to the snowy divide with the choir
of dead dahlias,
But neither dream nor forgetfulness is:
Brute flesh is.
—García Lorca, ‘Sleepless City’
Many years later Juan Gualberto composed a fragment of autobiography. Strictly speaking, it was a curriculum vitae, and as it was intended for the eyes of a government minister, it was necessarily economical with facts.
‘When I arrived in New York,’ it began. He didn’t say, and the minister hardly needed to know, that when he arrived in New York the city was grotesquely unlike anything he had anticipated. Wall-to-wall hippies, he remembered, when he cast his mind back to the summer of 1969. Vietnam vets returning; and drugs, so many drugs that these Americans seemed to be brain-damaged, drugged to their ears, tripping, crashing and overdosing. This at least was how it looked from Hell’s Kitchen, where the Catholic agency had installed its Cuban refugees in a cheap apartment house. The other residents, according to Juan’s calculation, consisted of 25 per cent ex-cons, 25 per cent drag queens and 50 per cent addicts.
Outside this depressing neighbourhood, on 42nd Street, he liked the lights and the crowds. And over on Times Square, where the grid of streets tied itself into a concentrated knot of energy, he was awed by the sheer profusion of the scene. You could go bowling here, and roll rubber balls into slots in a pokerina parlour, and watch flapjacks being flipped on a window grill. There was a shop where you could buy a Swiss hat with your name stitched in it, and another where they analysed you by computer. Best of all you could watch the ebb and flow of the crowds, day and night, eating, spending, touring, cruising and loving the mass spectacle of their massed selves.
Had he ventured further afield on those first two nights in Manhattan, he might have seen a still more memorable spectacle. There were riots on those nights in a Greenwich Village pub. The Stonewall Inn was frequented by homosexuals, and was periodically raided by the police. But on this occasion the homosexuals decided that they had had enough of this kind of treatment. So Juan could have said, ‘I came in’—that was the phrase he always used to describe his arrival in New York—’I came in with Gay Liberation.’
He didn’t say that; but what he did say was equally arresting. He came in with the man on the moon. It was an awesome climax, that moon landing, to a fabulous summer: Woodstock, Stonewall, and then the moon. All over the country people were glued to their TV screens. It was a triumph of the human spirit, a feat of American technology, and much else besides, though there were some, according to a survey conducted by the Times, who couldn’t have cared less. But Juan cared, passionately. He watched it all on an open-air screen in Times Square.
‘Do you remember’, I once asked him, ‘what you thought when you watched the landing?’
‘Yes,’ he smiled back, ‘how Fidel must be biting his tail!’
How would he find his way, who could he be in this place that dizzied him with such conflicting impressions: fear, contempt, exhilaration and a strong dose of self-vindicating Schadenfreude? He needed a guide, an interpreter. And so it was of more than casual significance that his account to the Minister began with an encounter.
When I arrived in New York [he wrote], I met Father E.B. He found me a school to learn English. I also began to take private dance lessons. In the summer of 1970 I auditioned for the Harkness Ballet and was accepted; and in September of the same year I was accepted as well with the Joffrey Ballet. From then on my goal in life was to be a dancer and I gave it my complete attention.
How did he meet this exemplary priest? Juan, I suspect, would have found the question of no interest. In New York City, as he described it, you simply bumped into people; they careered towards you out of the crowd with an air of fatality in a way that could neither be foreseen nor deflected. So the priest, when he appeared, required no explanation, although in retrospect one might see in him the first instalment of Juan’s own particular method of managing the American dream.
In short, he had found a patron. The affection and guidance that the priest provided were not entirely disinterested, but it would be churlish to esteem him less highly on this account. He was generous; with his time, his money, his house, his table and his bed. And if Juan had any cause for complaint, it was at first nothing more serious than the underdeveloped culinary imagination of his benefactor. A Cuban, he thought, should not be required to exist on a perpetual diet of steak and salad. After two or three days with the priest at his rectory in Greenwich Village, he was always glad to return to the apartment he shared with Alex on 103rd Street, where there would be a proper meal of rice and chicken and beans.
For two years, or possibly three, this agreeable arrangement persisted until, in ways so vague, so undefinable that Juan was never able to recall with any clarity, the relationship began to sour. Perhaps the priest was tiring of his young protégé, finding his charms too easy, his tastes too expensive or his occasional tantrums too exhausting. Or it may be that he was piqued by the attention that his boy was able to attract, and respond to, in the gay clubs that he was beginning to frequent. Whatever the reason, there came a parting of the ways: angry, ugly, and construed by Juan as betrayal.
He condensed the tawdry details into the memory of two incidents. The first happened one night when he went out with the priest to a restaurant in the Village. It was an event so commonplace, so trivial, that it is surprising to reflect that the ripples of it touched my own life more than a decade later, and extended even to the desk of the Minister for Immigration in Canberra. In the restaurant a waiter brought them a basket of bread, and the bread, when they opened it, was host to a nest of cockroaches. You did not have to be a Manhattan sophisticate to resent being served a tribe of insects for your dinner. Yet in the opinion of the restaurateur that was no justification for the violent row that ensued, for the escalating frenzy of insults and the wild overturning of the table. The police, when they came, agreed with the restaurateur, and the priest, in his embarrassment, agreed with the police, so that Juan was charged with disorderly conduct. It was, of course, unfair, which the court recognised when it heard the charge, but the magistrate gave him a lecture anyhow on the need to control his Latin temper.
About the betrayal of the priest they said nothing. Yet this was what burnt itself in Juan’s memory, and he remembered it because, in those days between the cockroaches and the court, he lived in terror, in gut-wrenching fear that they would deport him, return him to the mercies of the Revolution that he had des
erted. Surely that could not have been what the priest intended?
Soon after the episode with the cockroaches he finally parted company with his patron. The occasion he once again remembered in the context of a meal. Although it was of no moment to Juan, who adopted a thoroughly ecumenical spirit in his relationships, it happened that the priest was of the Episcopalian persuasion. This meant not only that he could marry but, in the opinion of a New England aunt who appears to have borne some family responsibility for her clerical nephew, that he should. Had she heard that his ministry in the Village was giving rise to scandal? Whatever her motives may have been, she arranged a luncheon at which Juan also contrived to be present, and there she pressed the claims of marriage on her nephew. Certainly, she considered, even in the absence of a suitable girl, the ‘Cuban boy’ would have to go, and a savage, speechless, retaliatory Cuban kick on the shins (which he always remembered with grim satisfaction) did nothing to alter her absolute resolve.
An aunt like this will have her way. And it may indeed have been a way that the priest himself desired, lured to the prospect of marriage by the siren manipulation of his therapist who, I imagine, promised him an integrated personality if he would only direct his energies to a real woman. In any event the boy was dismissed, and in due course the priest entered on a more conventional exercise of his sacred vocation, supported by the comfort of a wife in a Connecticut rectory.
Although in the end Juan fought with the priest like a wild cat, there had been a time, at least for a while, when the priest had believed in him, in his talent and in his future. He had paid the fees for the private dancing lessons that opened the way to the Joffrey Ballet and the chance for the boy to resume a career that the Revolution had done its best to close. At seventeen Juan was entitled to dream, to ignore the odds, and to trust in the inexplicable increase in grace and strength in his maturing body. In joining the Joffrey school he dreamed of stardom and he gave it—more or less—his complete attention.